Tuesday 1 March 2011

Immigration Teaching in American School





The concord academy is one of the top 10 K12 American Schools in the US. it is a private preparatory school for grades 9 to 12 situated in Concord, Massachusetts. on their main website I found a link to their curriculum and under the subject of history it had a little paragraph about immigration called 'Immigrants in America: Beyond the Melting Pot'. While reading the paragraph I did not see a lot of difference with the lecture we had on immigration. There did not seem to be a direct feeling of telling the 'story' differently.
In the 'module' it examines the history briefly, but mostly asks debate questions like: 'We discuss when different groups arrived, how they were received and represented, and how they have made their ways in America.' which seems to show that there is a larger interest in what immigration has done for/to America and less in what the lives of the immigrants were like before they moved to America and how it affected their lives.
At the end of the paragraph it says that the Prerequisite courses for the course are American History 2 and Geographical distribution, which I find quite peculiar in the way that it doesn't seem important for this course to know what life in Europe, Asia etc was like. Even though this is a history course that involves history in more than one part of the world, for the American immigration it apparently does not seem relevant to know who these immigrants actually are. Debates like how the immigrants were received and represented come up during the course which might have some sort of hostility towards immigrants since they will be represented by the teachers as 'intruders' more than inhabitants of the same country.
However this course does debate questions like 'when different groups arrived,
how they were received and represented, and how they have made their ways in America.' which shows that they do show interest in the immigrants from the point where they entered America.
Overall, this is a quite exclusive school with quite a lot of immigrants since their motto is: 'Concord Academy (...)enriched by a diversity of backgrounds, so that is maybe why this school might have had to have this more neutral look on immigration to avoid any form of discrimination between its students. the more typical public American schools might have a more 'American-viewed' immigrant history curriculum.

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